EMC Acquiring ScaleIO In Software-Defined Storage Play: Reports

Pages

EMC has either acquired or is in the final stages of acquiring storage software startup ScaleIO, a move that could help further define EMC's software-defined storage strategy and help disrupt the way businesses purchase storage.

As first reported Wednesday by the Israel-based Geektime blog, EMC has already acquired Israel-based ScaleIO for between $200 million and $300 million.

The storage startup at that time also disclosed an initial round of investment in the company of $12 million from a number of institutional and private investors, including funding from Frank Slootman, CEO of ServiceNow and the former CEO of Data Domain, now a part of EMC.

ScaleIO's ECS technology builds a scalable file system from thousands of existing and newly purchased servers. This allows a company to have a scalable storage architecture without the need for specialized storage administrators and without adding to the workload of existing server administrators, the company claims.

ScaleIO's technology is actually part of the nascent software-defined storage industry where much of the functionality of storage arrays are packaged in software that can either run on industry-standard servers or overlay existing storage gear.

An acquisition of ScaleIO by EMC, which is most likely in the works, is a big software-defined storage play for EMC, said Jamie Shepard, regional vice president at Lumenate, a Dallas-based solution provider and EMC partner.

ScaleIO, like a few other startups, is about software-defined storage and the idea of scaling storage with no SAN, Shepard said.

"Buy off-the-shelf servers, add Fusion-io or other flash, and add the software," he said. "They allow customers to easily add more capacity while getting more compute power. There's no more need for a SAN. This is the future of storage."

Doron Kempel says selling hyper-convergence can be challenging for solution providers, but success will come from taking business from competitors that are unprepared or hesitant to embrace the technology.